“Change the course of security policies with the help of the CUP. The CUP has abandoned the Government; let us restore police authority.” This is the demand on which the main opposition parties –PSC-Units and Junts– agreed yesterday during the plenary session on security held in Parliament. “Return the authority” that, according to both formations, the Mossos d'Esquadra have lost as a result of the agreement that ERC signed the anti-capitalists for the investiture of President Pere Aragonès.
The socialists promoted the holding of the plenary session after the vandalism episodes in Molins de Rei, the stabbings in Vic, the death from a firearm in Vilafranca del Penedès and the latest altercations in Barcelona and Manresa, all of which occurred last October. The objective was twofold: on the one hand, “to restore and guarantee police authority” by distancing it from “do-goodism” that “tends to exempt criminals from responsibilities,” which in the opinion of the socialists is practiced by the Ministry of the Interior. And on the other hand, emphasize the “overwhelming minority” that supports the current ERC Government, with whom they believe that “it cannot hope to address the security challenge alone.”
But at the heart of the debate lay the agreement between ERC and the CUP, since the demands of the anti-capitalists in matters of public order (withdrawal of foam bullets, of private accusations against protesters, dissolution of bodies of lawyers, or the commission to study the police model) have been the subject of political criticism since the pact was forged. The socialists were the most explicit in demanding that the Government “throw this agreement into the trash can of history.” In exchange, they offered an outstretched hand to the Government to reach “agreements and pacts”, as proposed by Salvador Illa, despite his “many and great reservations in the political direction” of the Department of the Interior of Joan Ignasi Elena.
The president of the Government took up Illa's glove and proposed an agreement to the groups based on a common link, the rejection of the "speech of fear" of the extreme right in matters of security. Aragonès offered to include the parties in the Security Council of Catalonia, the advisory body made up of entities of all kinds in which the basic principles of security policies are shared. His objective is to obtain a widely agreed upon roadmap on this matter. But the proposal fell on deaf ears.
Minister Elena expressed along the same lines, for whom despite the recent “specific episodes” of violence and the global increase in crimes to pre-pandemic levels, “Catalonia is a safe country” and asked the opposition to flee from the “ traps” of the extreme right, which makes “fear” its “electoral battering ram.”
